Jul 28 2010

Love Your Family, Be Wary of Your HD-DSLR

Category: In-Camera Techniques, Multimedia & Video, Technology InsightsEthan G. Salwen @ 4:43 pm

Since writing last night about a blog post by Gail Mooney, she’s written two more, and also done some major reporting Down Under for her “Opening Our Eyes” documentary project. Go Mooney!

Here are two key lessons I take away from Mooney’s “The Importance of ‘Family’” and “The Hard Part About Working with DSLRs”, both of which I encourage you to read — gaining insights from both Mooney’s Humane Side as well as her Tech-Nerdy Side:

• Family matters more than anything. So keep on building, loving and appreciating your “family,” even if these people are not related by blood.

As Mooney says of a young homeless man helped by the Oasis project: “His wants are simple – to love and be loved. How very basic and yet so tragic that being part of a family seems so out of reach for so many.”

• HD-DSLR cameras are not the best tools for recording video for making movies. HD-DSLRs are a major pain for capturing video, so (at least for now) for the best, most hassle free video-only shooting we’re better of with HD video cameras.

As Mooney says: “Yes, the visual [of HD-DSLRs] is stunning but I can’t help but think how many moments I may have missed that I probably would have gotten if I had been shooting with a video camera.”

Let’s go to the video. . .

To honor both family and not capturing video on HD-DSLRs — I used my measly Canon G9 — I share a home movie I made a year-and-a-half ago. Back then these wackos were just the wacky family of my girlfriend. But now, with the wedding set for January, these wackos are my family, too. Yes!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


May 27 2010

How I Made Them Dance the Tango

Category: Creative Process, In-Camera Techniques, Multimedia & Video, Workflow & DAMEthan G. Salwen @ 2:50 pm

AfterCapture Blog_100527_How Dance_1On Monday I shared my tango-dancing salt and pepper shakers. How did I produce this short? Basically, I hit record on my Canon G9, set to the time-lapse video mode, and then moved my characters around like a madman — for a little more than a half hour. That’s about it.

That said, I’ll now share the some specifics of my time-lapse-stop-motion video creation workflow, as I think it is interesting. I also think that my little piece is successful because, although I started it simply to play around with technology, I ended up focusing on a story. This kept me focused, gave me motivation both to create and share, and gives my piece any value that it may have.

My Time-Lapse-Stop-Motion Experience

After finishing watching the original “Clash of the Titans” movie earlier in the day, I was pretty eager to play with stop-motion, which is something that I have never done, but which I’ve been dying to try since, well, probably about the first time I saw “Clash,” nearly 30 years ago.

While I had never tried stop motion, I’ve been recording all kinds of time-lapse movies since getting my G9 and discovering this wonderful feature. So before I went through the trouble of making a stop-motion movie, I decided to use this feature — recording a still every two seconds — to get a sense of what a stop-motion piece would look like.

Quickly setting up my camera on a tripod on the kitchen table and hitting “record,” and moving the objects at hand around, I ended up with this:

Pretty cool!, I thought.

Obviously the hairy hands aren’t supposed to show up in a stop-motion movie, but I loved the potential. So. . . Continue reading “How I Made Them Dance the Tango”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,